


Suerte

by evlytheevilqueen



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bilingual Lance (Voltron), Cuban Lance (Voltron), Found Family Feels, It miiiiight show a tad bit that this was written by someone who studied translation, Lance (Voltron) Speaks Spanish, M/M, Multi, so no need to worry for the linguistically sensitive, the Spanish was helpfully supplied by a Colombian friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 13:33:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9551225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evlytheevilqueen/pseuds/evlytheevilqueen
Summary: Since everyone was pushing off cleaning duty on Lance because apparently they found Coran's rambling a lot less bearable, they eventually started swapping stories about their home planets and families and traditions whenever they were cleaning together.Then Lance stabs his toe and somehow that escalates into group language lessons, don't ask him how.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kima](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kima/gifts).



> So Alex asked me to write her schmoopy fluff. And I might have been grumbling to myself about the lack of fics that actually work with bilingual Lance or make him say more than two words in Spanish if they do. So it kind of became about that. And about bonding and found family.
> 
> Translations in the end notes!

At first, their meetings hadn't even really been that. It was more that Lance always managed to say something or other that got him a slip in the chore jar – they had a system, where Keith got his slips for No Tact and Rushing Into Things Without Thinking, Shiro was in for Not Being Able To Chill For Five Seconds, Pidge got punished for Being Too Smart For Your Own Good Is No Excuse To Be This Snarky and Hunk's downfall was Thinking Too Much About Food At Really Inopportune Moments. Lance had no clue what exactly he was doing that got him slips so often. Being Awesome, probably? Maybe Too Handsome To Bear. Though that should probably get him more slips from his boyfriends than from Hunk and Pidge. Alas, they were putting in just as many as Shiro and Keith. It was also entirely unfair that Allura got to put in slips but wasn't forced to do any chores just because she was technically their boss and also royalty.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. So, Lance got handed a lot of chores around the castle. And for some reason, the chore no one wanted and which therefor always ended up on Lance's list was Cleaning Stuff With Coran. Mostly the cryopods.

Lance wasn't sure why, though. Of course constantly scrubbing down stuff sucked, sure. And Coran talked, like, a LOT. About things that sometimes sounded crazy and kept rambling on. But come on, cut the man some slack. His entire race was gone except for Allura and he'd lost his home planet and been asleep for ten thousand years. Just the thought of being stuck out here for so long he'd never get to see his sisters or his parents or actually any of his relatives again was making him sick to the core, and that's kind of exactly what happened o Coran. Hell, Lance had no clue how long they'd been out here by now, was his abuela even still alive? Sure, she was tough as nails, but no one lived forever, right? Except for Zarkon apparently, that dick.

Point is, if Coran wanted to ramble about Altean boot camps or whatever, Lance sure was gonna let him get some of it out. Anyway, Coran seemed to be the only one who really got the level of Lance's homesickness.

Not that the others didn't miss their families or Earth, but... It was different for everyone. Allura just seemed to get so incredibly sad whenever anyone apart from Coran talked about Altea with her. Not just wistful but like actively depressed to a degree where you'd feel guilty for bringing it up. Pidge was too focused on finding her family; Keith didn't have any left back on Earth and had been living alone in the goddamn DESERT for like a year for fuck's sake, obviously no love lost there. Shiro was too busy going through his Galra-induced PTSD and worrying about literally everything near constantly to be homesick. Hunk somewhat got it, but talking to Hunk about home always ended up with Lance craving his mom's garlic knots and being even more sad because he didn't really have the ingredients to try and make them himself even if he wanted to.

So, next to cuddling the life out of his boyfriends and Hunk whenever he craved his mom's hugs and trying to figure out the Altean equivalent of video games with Pidge when he missed his oldest sister, Monica, kicking his butt at literally every game there was so much he wanted to cry, talking to Coran turned out to be the best cure for his bursts of homesickness.

Since everyone was pushing off cleaning duty on Lance because apparently they found Coran's rambling a lot less bearable, they eventually started swapping stories about their home planets and families and traditions whenever they were cleaning together. Sometimes they got so caught up in their stories they stayed in the cryo bay long after everything was already sparkling again.

It still didn't really move out of this weird little space of theirs until the day Lance stabbed his toe full force on the cryopod he'd been cleaning in an enthusiastic full-body retelling of that time his sister Angie – short for Angelique, his mom had an obsession with France during that pregnancy, don't ask – had tried to learn breakdancing. Head still stuck on his family and Varadero Beach, what slipped out of his mouth was a string of Spanish curse words that would have had his mom dragging him over to the sink by his ear to wash out his mouth.

By the time Lance was done cursing and hopping around the room on one foot while clutching his injured toe, Coran was watching him wide-eyed.

“What was that?” He sounded genuinely shocked. For an irrational moment, Lance thought it was at his language.

“Oh, sorry, just stabbed my toe, don't mind me. No need to put anything in the chore jar!” Shiro had a thing about putting in slips for bad language. He'd really missed his calling with this whole paladin business, he should have been a kindergarten teacher.

But Coran just kept staring at him as if he had started growing a second head. “No, I meant what were you just saying?”

Lance just blinked at him for a moment before understanding dawned. “Oh! You mean the Spanish?”

“Spanish?” Coran blinked back at him.

“Yeah, you know. It's another Earth language. Actually the one I grew up with.”

Coran's eyes started sparkling the way Pidge's did when she got to play around with a piece of new Altean tech. “Earth has multiple languages?”

It was Lance's turn to blink. “Wait, Altea didn't?”

Coran stroked his mustache in thought. “Well, there were some dialects in really remote locations, but almost no one could use them anymore by the time we were overwhelmed by the Galra. Is it like that on Earth? That beach island of yours does sound pretty remote.”

“Oh, nonono! I mean, there are some of those, too, but for like pretty much every bigger language. Actually, Spanish is the second most wide-spread language on Earth, even before English. And that's just counting native speakers, not people who learned later in life.”

And thus began a very long afternoon of comparing Altean culture and its differences to the multitude of Earth cultures and languages. Altea seemed to have been pretty standardized in every way and the chaos of different music and mindsets and languages Earth had bred seemed to fascinate Coran to no end. They probably would have sat in the cryo bay all night if a cranky Keith hadn't dragged Lance off to bed at some point, only to shove him into the kitchen when he heard that Lance had completely forgotten about dinner.

It took a few days until the cryopods were due for another cleaning, due to Hunk and Yellow getting a thorough beating from the Galran fleet. Lance had barely left the bay between dragging Hunk there with Shiro's help and him waking up, at that point a few more hours cleaning with Coran wouldn't hurt.

Coran seemed to be catching onto his somber mood and tried his best to cheer him up with mindless chatter. What eventually got Lance's attention was something else, though.

“Would you mind teaching me this Spanish?”

For a moment Lance just stared at him before the meaning of the words really caught up with his brain. “I- uh... Why?”

Coran shrugged his shoulders. Lance narrowed his eyes at the nonchalance of the gesture. “I just thought it would be nice. I find your many Earth languages fascinating, and it did sound very different from the English you're all speaking. You seem to miss it a bit, and since you have no one else here to use it with...” He shrugged. “I could teach you a little Altean in return, if you want? I heard Pidge complain about the castle's learning program, it seems to not be the way you learn languages on Earth.”

Lance grimaced at the memory of Pidge's very vivid description of Altea's concept of learning a new language. “Yeah, maybe not that.” He tried very hard to make himself look as nonchalant and relaxed as Coran. There was a pleasant warmth curling in his gut at the thought of someone going to the trouble of learning his mother tongue so he'd feel slightly less homesick. “And I mean, if you wanna learn, who am I to deny intercultural exchange, right?”

They quickly learned that the cryo bay during cleaning time was not a very productive environment for learning a language with a completely different alphabet – or possibly any language at all, really. That was when the regular meetings started. They kept switching up rooms, covering everything in Post-it notes Coran had gotten from who knew where. At first just for the respective vocabulary, but bit by bit they also added common prepositions and verbs used in context with whatever the note was taped to and, as the weeks passed by, occasionally idioms, sayings, whatever came to mind. It got to the point where Lance stopped counting backwards from ten to keep from throttling Keith when he was being especially stubborn and started conjugating the Altean equivalent of 'to be' instead.

They weren't exactly trying to keep their lessons a secret but neither did they announce them to anyone who wasn't asking, and they always cleaned away their post-it notes after each meeting so they wouldn't annoy the rest of the castle's inhabitants by covering every spare inch in vocabulary notes. Apart from the by now pretty frequent friendly jabs from everyone else about him spending a suspicious amount of time with Coran no one seemed to think more on what they were doing during all that time. Until that one evening they all happened to spend in the common room. Pidge was squirming around on the couch she was sharing with Hunk to find a more comfortable position to read in when she suddenly peeled a neon green post-it from the back of her shirt.

“What's that?” She held it up for everyone to inspect. “Is that Altean? And what's that under that?”

“Oh, that's Spanish. Lance and I have been teaching each other. We must have forgotten this one on one of the pillows.” Coran barely looked up from his own book.

Pidge narrowed her eyes at the note. “Well, I have no idea what the Altean says but I think the other one is cojín?”

It sounded more like co-gin than anything else. Lance rolled his eyes, automatically correcting her.

“Cojín. Not the same sound as a J in English. So yeah, that's definitely coming from one of the pillows, must have slipped off.”

T he idle motions of Keith's hand in his hair had stopped at some point during the exchange. Lance turned his head to pout at him and found every pair of eyes in the room on him, with the exception of Hunk and Coran. Keith's eyes looked as if they were going to fall out of his head any second now.

“You speak Spanish?”

“Yeees?” Lance shot them all a questioning glance. “I grew up in Cuba?” It sounded way more like a question than the statement it was. 

“Really?” Pidge furrowed her brow at him. “I always figured you grew up in the US. You sound more American than the rest of us combined.”

Lance shrugged his shoulders as much as he could without having to jostle his comfortable position too much. Shiro was rarely relaxed enough that Lance could use his thighs as a pillow. Even though they were quite possibly made for that purpose, at least if you asked Lance. Well, that and riding either Keith or him into oblivion because damn could those thigh muscles hold up for a long time...

Shiro lightly flicked his nose and Lance shook himself back into reality.

“I dunno, that's probably from all the movies I watched when I learned.”

“When you- when exactly did you start learning English?” Shiro stared down at him with wide eyes.

Lance scrunched up his nose, trying to remember. “Ehhh... I was ten I think? My stepfather had just started hanging around us a lot and I thought it sounded really cool so I begged him to teach me.”

Keith seemed to choke on his own saliva and Pidge  looked at him as if he were her newest science experiment.

“But... you have no accent?”

Lance was about to open his mouth to respond when Hunk piped up over the background noise of Coran trying to explain what was going on to a dumbfounded Allura. “Probably because Lance is crazy good at languages.  He speaks like five at least. ” Lance was about to  wave the comment off when Coran rejoined the conversation.

“Oh, that explains so much! He's been picking up Altean remarkably quick!” 

Lance narrowed his eyes at him,  eyebrow raised . “Just yesterday you told me I'm at the level of an Altean nine-year-old.”

Coran shrugged at him and twirled his mustache. “Well, most Non-Alteans I've known needed years to get that far, so you're actually a very fast learner.”

Before Lance could say anything to that a pillow hit him in the face, an outraged Pidge glaring at him from across the table when he removed it. “You're already at elementary school levels?! I can barely say three sentences still and I've been attacked by weird bear monster  simulations !”

“Sorry?” Lance tried to hide in Shiro's chest and was gently pushed back into his earlier position by an amused Shiro.

Allura  was  watch ing him  with more curiosity than she'd ever directed his way before . “Can you say something in Spanish? I would like to know what it sounds like.”

Lance grinned at her. "Claro, todo lo que desees princesa." 

“What, Allura gets a Spanish sentence and your boyfriends don't?” Keith was actively doing his emo-pout thing and Lance had admittedly always been weak for that, even if he usually tried to cover it up by being an extra annoying shit.

"De hecho, tu pelo estúpido me gusta mucho, chanchito.“

Well, some habits were hard to break.

Keith narrowed his eyes at him as if he knew  what was going on in Lance's head – at this point he probably had at least a rough idea.

“You totally just insulted me, didn't you?”

“You'll never knoo~ow,” Lance said in his most annoying sing-song voice, until Keith tried to push him off the couch and only Shiro's grip on him saved him from a face full of floor.

Lance grinned up at him. “Por eso eres mi novio favorito, cariño.“

Shiro grinned back as if he had any idea what Lance just said – which, really, wasn't that hard to guess. Keith was back to pouting dramatically like the dramaqueen he was. 

Coran was sitting up in his seat with a manic twinkle in his eyes. “I understood that last one!”

Lance held out his hand for a high five and Coran actually got up and delivered. Lance had taught him well, indeed.

If possible, Keith's pout had deepened. Even Lance deemed it ridiculous at this point. So obviously, he had to kiss it off. Which ended up with another slip in the chore jar courtesy of Pidge, who complained very loudly about her eyes.

 

After that, Coran and Lance's one-on-one lessons didn't stay that way for long. The first to come in and ask if she could learn too was Allura. Apparently she really liked the sound of Spanish and wanted to be able to speak it herself.  Also, there was honestly not much to do in space when they weren't on a mission or preparing for a mission or being attacked by Galra, so that might have played into it as well.

Hunk was next and there was an embarrassingly emotional scene that involved a lot of hugging and gratuitous tears and Hunk apologizing for not getting the same idea Coran had  had  way earlier. He kept insisting he had failed his best friend duties and Lance had to keep reassuring him in between bursts of crying and eating the cookies Hunk had brought to make up for his misgivings. 

Unsurprisingly, Shiro somehow caught wind of that and joined them during their next setting. He wasn't even deterred by Lance's constant shameless flirting, as everyone else pretended really convincingly they didn't know exactly what he was saying even without understanding the words per se.  Shiro even got his own Post-it  at one memorable lesson. It just read  cariño.  Lance had never been kissed so silly over a Post-it before. By the time they  finally emerged from their improvised class room, the note was sticking to Lance's back instead.

Shiro was in general pushing Lance to talk more about his family and his home and was asking for 'additional Spanish practice' at random intervals. Keith  kept grumbl ing at him that he  might as well just admit that he liked the way it rolled off Lance's tongue. At which point Lance would make lewd jokes and recite Shakira lyrics. What? He didn't know what else to say whenever he was asked to speak Spanish out of the blue. Shakira lyrics were something he knew, he grew up with five sisters and one or the other was always listening to one of her songs. And hey, they were good, okay? So what if Keith eventually caught on and made fun of him. Keith also made fun of his face masks and complained about not being able to get the stains out of his sleep shirt and yet he wouldn't shut up about how soft and nice Lance's skin was once Shiro and him had fucked the filters out of him. So what did Keith know, really. 

It was actually kind of nice, to be able to tell them all about his family late at night, curled up together under the blanket after a hard day of fighting and almost losing each other. They had avoided the topic so hard beforehand, scared of the minefields of Shiro's year with the Galra and less than perfect family and Keith's past in general. Lance had tried to avoid rubbing his happy family and peaceful childhood in their faces and Shiro and Keith had been too scared to ask, in case they ended up unearthing something similar to their own stories in the end. But now they seemed to like Lance's family anecdotes as some kind of good night stories, happy for him that he'd had it better than them in that regard, and Shiro at least seemed genuinely happy at the prospect of hopefully getting to meet all of Lance's crazy family one day. Keith veered more on the terrified side, which Lance honestly thought was the saner response.

Next to butt in on their little learning group was a begrudging Pidge who was definitely not there because being taught by Lance had to be an easier way to learn Altean than the castle's program, not at all. She seemed almost put out when it did actually work better. To win her over Lance taught her a select choice of  Spanish curse words on the side that he never mentioned to any of the others so they wouldn't catch on. 

Keith held out for a surprisingly  long time. Lance could tell that he actually liked the language. He demanded Lance just say anything at all in Spanish way more often than Shiro even though he knew perfectly well that there was a 90 % chance that Lance would just be quoting more Shakira lyrics to mess with him. Meanwhile, there was a 100 % chance of Keith coming whenever Lance wanted him to if he only switched to Spanish in bed. Shiro and Lance might or might not have used that to tag-team him on multiple occasions. 

T he straw that broke the back of Keith's stubbornness was one of their many fights, to exactly no one's surprise.  Lance was yelling at Keith for being a reckless idiot and charging in on his own unnecessarily, Shiro quietly disapproving in the corner. Keith, of course, was yelling back just as passionately as if he'd been in the right about this at any point in time. As if all his extra risk had accomplished hadn't been giving everyone a goddamn heart attack. After what felt like hours of fruitless back and forth, Lance threw his hands in the air, switching to Spanish with a frustrated growl because he knew not  being able to  understand what he was saying would drive Keith up the wall.

"A veces ni sé por qué te quiero tanto!"

Keith's face went red with rage. “You just insulted me, didn't you? Do it to my face, you coward!”

Lance crossed his arms and recited the Altean alphabet backwards in his mind so he wouldn't accidentally choke the life out of his boyfriend. “Well, why don't you find out?”

“Maybe I will!”

“Go ahead!”

They both stormed off and eventually buried the argument when Keith finally came crawling into bed with Shiro and Lance at 3 am with a quiet sorry. He'd probably let his frustrations out on the poor robots on the training deck until then. At least he'd showered before coming back. Ughhh, stupid, nice-smelling Keith.

Lance didn't expect anything to come out of what they said at the end of that argument, not after they had settled it for good. When Keith came into their next learning session with an honest to God notebook in his arm and an intense look of concentration on his face Lance promptly choked on his space juice.

It turned out, once Keith actually deigned to try to learn he was easily the best of them all. In theory. His pronunciation was _terrible_ and kind of made Lance want to rip his ears off, but somehow it was also horrifyingly endearing at the same time. So he just suffered in silence and soothed his wounded sense of language with Keith's proud grins when he got something right and Shiro's knowing, indulgent smiles when Lance tried very hard not to flinch as Keith slaughtered his mother tongue. Like, Lance was aware that Spanish wasn't easy to pronounce for everyone, but he hadn't known you could get it this horribly wrong even with proper guidance.

Even so, it warmed his heart as much as it hurt his ears when Keith became confident enough to actually throw sweet nothings at him in Spanish occasionally. Every once in a while the pet names would come out – well, every once in a while except for when Lance wanted to be annoying and finished every sentence with them. Shiro and Lance used cariño for each other consistently, and Shiro extended the courtesy to Keith once he'd given up the pretense of despising the pet names. Eventually, Keith settled on corazón for Lance. Much to his astonishment, he never changed it to something more embarrassing, even after he found out what chanchito meant. When Lance actually got mushy enough over it that he started calling Keith something less annoying all he got for his efforts was a flick on the nose and Keith refusing to react to anything except chanchito. 

In the end, Lance was speaking almost more Spanish than English most days and while how understandable the replies were varied wildly depending on whom he was talking to, they could still all mostly understand him if he didn't talk too fast. He'd feared it would make him more homesick at first, but crazy people barging in on him at all times and yelling at him in Spanish occasionally and loving him unconditionally no matter what felt so much like home that there was barely any room to miss his family on Earth. He couldn't wait for the day he would be able to introduce his two families to each other. And he wouldn't even have to play interpreter. He'd only have to keep Keith from saying anything at all in front of his relatives. 

 

Suerte que en el sur hayas nacido

Y que burlemos las distancias,

Suerte que es haberte conocido

Y por ti amar tierras extra ñ as

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Cojín - just pillow/cushion, as you might have guessed ;)  
> Claro, todo lo que desees princesa. - Sure, anything you wish, princess.  
> De hecho, tu pelo estúpido me gusta mucho, chanchito. - I actually like your stupid hair a lot. Chanchito is a really sickly sweet pet name that basically translates to piglet  
> Por eso eres mi novio favorito, cariño. - And that's why you're my favorite boyfriend. Cariño is the classic love/darling etc.  
> A veces ni sé por qué te quiero tanto! - Sometimes I don't know why I like you so much!  
> Corazón - Also a common pet name, literally just heart
> 
> And of course I had to add some Shakira lyrics at the end:
> 
> Suerte que en el sur hayas nacido  
> Y que burlemos las distancias,  
> Suerte que es haberte conocido  
> Y por ti amar tierras extrañas
> 
> It's lucky that you were born in the South  
> so you can make fun of the distance between us  
> I'm lucky to have met you  
> and your love of foreign countries
> 
> You may know the English version as Whenever, Wherever ;) You can find a lyrics video for the Spanish version with an English translation here (and no, it's not just a word for word from the English version, if you're confused about the logistics of song translation I'll gladly get into that with you): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhRrd9ZK8TU 
> 
> Yell at me in the language of your choice here or on tumblr! You can find me at vodkaniliforv


End file.
